Human-robot interface for instructing industrial tasks using kinesthetic teaching

Today, the manufacturing industries increasingly demand more flexible and agile production systems. This demand is also reflected onto the field of robotics, as the majority of robots in the industry today are bolted to the ground and dedicated to a specific task. An Autonomous Industrial Mobile Manipulator (AIMM) offers a higher level of hardware flexibility, but in order to benefit from this flexibility the demand for new approaches to operating and programming new tasks is inevitable. Research within this topic has proposed a task-level-programming, where robot programming is generalized into a selection of skills. This paper presents a human-robot interface based on task-level-programming and kinesthetic teaching, which was assessed by nine people of varying robotics experience. In evaluation of the tests several improvements to the HRI are proposed, while the underlying concept is found to simplify programming of industrial task and thus making this available to the production floor operator.